Ep. 14: Sam Harris, PhD - Spirituality, Neuroscience, Meditation, and More

Sam Harris is a neuroscience Ph. D. and the author of the bestselling books, The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, and Lying. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. In this episode, we explore the science of lying, "spirituality" or spiritual experiences, religion, meditation, and more. It's really a discussion of the human experience, and how to optimize it without harming others. Sam's writing has been published in more than 15 languages. Mr. Harris and his work have been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and many other journals http://www.samharris.org/site/media_print/. Show notes and links can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast Enjoy!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Guten Tag, ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss and this is another edition of the Tim Ferriss Show. I'm going to start off with one of my favorite quotes, and I might do more of this if you like it, each episode leading with one of my favorite quotes. And this quote is from Lucius Aeneas Seneca, often abbreviated to Seneca, and it is, "Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." Very, very true and very fortune cookie-like, but Seneca was imminently quotable for that and very criticized by his contemporaries in some cases because of it. My guest this episode is Sam Harris. People often ask me, "What blogs do I read regularly?"

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  And "What people do I admire as writers?" And one of them is certainly Sam Harris. His blog is incredible. You can visit him online at samharris.org. He has a PhD in neuroscience, and he's also a very well-known writer. He has authored several New York Times bestsellers, including The End of Faith. He has written shorter books like Lying, which is a short treatise on lying and the implications of lying, How to Get Around It, which I was a proofreader for, and very honored to be a proofreader for. And he is a very controversial fellow. I find many of his views not to be as controversial as they are when misunderstood, but in this episode, we talk about everything from psychedelics to drug use to religion to spirituality, everything in between.

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  There are many topics that we would like to discuss in an episode two or a continuation of this, so please let me know, let Sam know, @samharris on Twitter, if you like this, and we will do more of it. Hope you enjoy. Thanks for listening.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 1:52Tim Ferriss?

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  The Tim Ferriss Show.

• 2:05Tim Ferriss?

  Sam Harris, my good man, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me. Congratulations on the podcast.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. Thank you very much. I was trying to turn back the clock and figure out how we first met or connected and I couldn't figure it out. I was actually hoping that you could tell me. Do you recall offhand how that came to be?

• 2:26Speaker 03

  I think we met in a bathroom at the TED conference.

• 2:31Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my god, that's right!

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Yes, one of those awkward moments where you both leave the urinal and then have to introduce each other.

• 2:37Tim Ferriss?

  I'd totally forgotten about that. Yeah, that is a memory. How did I forget that? That makes me worry about my cognitive health.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  The decision whether you shake hands or not at that point.

• 2:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was extremely awkward, yet at the same time exciting, which is not the appropriate emotion to have in the men's room, because I'd been a fan of your work for so long and I was at this extremely surreal semi-celeb dinner where I was clearly not the celebrity in the same restaurant and the desserts, I remember this is part of the reason I could have been off, were brownies that were loaded with all sorts of substances that were not supplied by the restaurant.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  I missed that dinner.

• 3:24Tim Ferriss?

  You're right. It may have been the dinner you were meant to attend. Well, I'll try to get this train back on the rails. For those people who may not be familiar with your work, and of course I will provide a lot in the show notes, but I'd love to know how you currently answer the question, "What do you do?" If you get that question at a cocktail party or elsewhere, what do you say? Is it writer or is it something else?

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, mostly a writer. My background is in neuroscience and philosophy and I still have a toe in the water of doing research neuroscience. I'm collaborating on a fMRI study with a friend at USC right now, which is actually a follow-up on work I did for my PhD on belief formation. So depending on the context, I'm a scientist, but mostly I think of myself as a writer and my interest...

• 4:21Speaker 03

  In neuroscience has always been, from the get-go, it was always philosophical and always purpose toward writing and thinking about the human mind. And so it was, it was never clear to me that I wanted to be a full-time research scientist. It was always my motive to just be able to understand and interpret the work of the 30,000-plus neuroscientists who are working at this moment and use that to change our thinking about the nature of human subjectivity and all of the ways in which those changes would

• 5:06Speaker 03

  affect public policy and how we conceive of a good life and how we think we should be living and what sort of institutions we create, etc. So it's certainly author first in terms of how I show up most of the time.

• 5:19Tim Ferriss?

  And these are very big topics, of course, and very controversial in some cases. And we're going to touch on a lot in this conversation. We've had some great dinners. We'll talk about free will, we'll talk about spiritual experience, what that means, especially in the context of science. We'll talk about guns, which, just to add, if you didn't have enough controversy already, just to add that to the mix. But let's talk about the fMRI. I've spent a little bit of time at the Sandler Neuroscience Lab in the last six months or so with the Gazali team, the Adam Gazali team, looking at fMRI. What are you looking at in this current or upcoming study? What is the, what's the subject?

• 5:57Speaker 03

  Well, the first work I did with fMRI, and this was part of my

• 6:02Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe you could explain to people what an fMRI is also, that might be helpful.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's the same scanner you go into to get an MRI, a structural Scan of your, any part of your body. So it's, the scanner's the same, but then, then there are pulse sequences uh that allow you to track blood flow changes in the brain with this, this same scanner. So you get an anatomical image of the sort you would, you would get of your brain if they were looking for, for some evidence of brain injury or disease. Uh, but then you get a, you can get a statistical map of, of blood flow changes uh in more or less real time. And blood flow changes uh track to, to a first approximation uh neuron, changes in neuronal firing.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  So, so where neurons get more active, uh that, that, that real estate calls for more blood and there's a, there's a bit of a, a time lag, but the, this method of observing changes in neuronal activity in, in the, in the brains of healthy, thinking people uh is, is pretty well validated at this point. And it's, it gives you a, a clearer picture of what's going on in the brain than a, than a, a similar me- method uh of, of functional tracking like EEG that people are probably familiar with, where you're just getting electrical changes at the surface of the, the scalp. That doesn't, that, that's very hard to use to localize the, the, what's actually going on in, in, inside the brain in various structures.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  So FMIs, FMRI and PET are really the, the best ways to, to get a, a good local picture of, of changes in blood flow. And so I, I did uh, for my PhD work at UCLA, I studied belief and disbelief and uncertainty and looked at the, at what was different about a brain that believed a proposition like two plus two equals four uh versus a, a, a brain that, that disbelieved a proposition like two plus two equals five. And then compared both of those states to, to just frank uncertainty, uh you know, whether you give someone a, an equation they can't solve and they know they can't solve it and they, and they just don't know whether it's true or false. And I did that across many different.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Domains of thinking, it wasn't just math, it was ethics, it was a person's autobiography, it was geography, and I think we had eight categories. And then we did a follow-up study where we looked at, where we had selected our subject pools to be atheists or devout Christians, and we looked at religious belief versus ordinary beliefs. And found that religious belief was very much like any belief. So to believe that you're sitting on a chair, or that you're in San Francisco, had something important in common with the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin, etc.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Because, which was really my hypothesis going in, that we have this one mode of representing reality in our thoughts, and we do truth testing on those linguistic propositions. And it requires very different kinds of processing to judge whether a mathematical statement is true versus an ethical statement, like torturing kids is wrong. You know, obviously two plus two equals four, to parse that, and to parse a statement about torture, those are very different operations upstream in the brain, but there's a kind of downstream area where they get accepted or rejected as true or false.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  And we found this to be in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, midline in the front of the brain. And so we did, we're now doing a follow-up study on belief where we try to change people's beliefs in real time.

• 9:55Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  And look at, which is what it is to actually have your beliefs successfully changed, and what it is to fight those, fight that evidence and argument, and hold to your beliefs despite counter evidence. And so we're in process on that.

• 10:10Tim Ferriss?

  So you're looking at the physiological markers of someone being persuaded or not persuaded?

• 10:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, and we're doing it with beliefs that, for which we would think they would have no real strong commitment, and beliefs that we know they're going to hold to tenaciously. So just to look at both sides of that.

• 10:31Tim Ferriss?

  Have you, I would imagine you might have, but have you looked at the methods used to beat polygraphs? And? It's traditional, if you want to look at it that way, lie detector tests.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, the problem with traditional lie detectors is that they just were they just were not valid science. I mean, they're not based on, they're not tracking deception. They're tracking anxiety, in a sense, and physiological arousal, in a very peripheral sense. They're not even, we're not talking about brain imaging. We're talking about whether somebody's palms are sweaty.

• 11:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  And so there are many tricks to beating traditional polygraphs, but the fundamental problem is that they just were going to be beaten by happenstance anyway. You're going to have truth tellers who were who were found to be liars and liars who were found to be truth tellers just because the methodology isn't valid. And the National Science Foundation, at some point, about 10 years ago, I think, came out and just said, this is this is phrenology, you know, this is not, this is not science, and no important decisions should turn on this. But I think we are ultimately going to have lie detectors that we judge to be valid. I think that's, there's no special problem in figuring that out.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  And if you had a belief detector, which to some extent we already do, it's something based on the work I did for my PhD, you do have a de facto lie detector, because if you can tell what somebody's believing, you can tell whether they're representing their beliefs honestly. But there are problems with neuroimaging-based lie detection, and certainly FMRI is incredibly sensitive to motion. So, you know, if you were just not, if you're not going to, if you didn't want to cooperate with the process, you would just have to move a little too much and you'd screw up the data completely.

• 12:29Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  So it's a work in progress.

• 12:33Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any opinion, of course, you and I have talked about lying quite a bit, given that you wrote a book called Lying, and I read an early draft of that. It's a fantastic short read, and I'm wondering if you have any opinion on micro-expressions or analysts who are paid very, very large sums of money to watch, for instance, earnings announcements of public companies to determine what is true, what is not, what might be an exaggeration or not. Do you have any thoughts on that subject?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Uh, it's interesting. I didn't know people were doing that. If, I didn't know analysts were, um, uh, or- Entire companies dedicated. BCs were, were subjected to that kind of scrutiny. But, um, uh, yeah, that's, that's based on Paul Ekman's work on micro-expressions and, and- It's all, it's, it's very interesting. I, I don't know that anyone gets reliably good enough at it to be relied upon by others. I think, I remember Paul Ekman was saying that the people who we think are, are good at detecting lies are, are viewed basically at, you know, sixty percent or whatever, and, and most people are, are just a chance.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  And I, I think there, there are a few, uh, exceptions, but in, in terms of what micro-expressions can get you, you know, I, I don't think- I think we're gonna do much better with technology and, and, and even, even just facial recognition technology. I bet computers are gonna beat people now. I'm, I'm just, that's just a hunch. I haven't actually followed that work. But if, if they're not beating people now, they're eventually gonna, gonna beat people, I would expect. But what you really want more than the facial display of emotion is you, is you want to understand the neurophysiology of deception and, um, and just, just propositional knowledge. Is what, what someone knows and what they, what they're representing and, and when those two diverge.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  And we have that to some degree. So, so there's a graduate student in, in the same lab I did my PhD work in who, who just grabbed my data a couple of years, uh, after I acquired it and did a more sophisticated analysis on it. A, what's called a machine learning analysis where they could, uh, look at the, the single trial level. So, so what happens with that MRI work is that you, you're looking at, at aggregated data, you know, many, many trials and, and over many, many people. Um, but if you have the right statistical tools, you can, you can look at single, the single, a single question and a single person and see, differentiate, see whether you can differentiate belief from disbelief, for instance.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  And, and, uh, this, this woman Pamela Douglas found that she with something like ninety-five percent accuracy could tell whether a subject believed or disbelieved a proposition in my paradigm. And my paradigm wasn't even set up to make this that particularly easy to do. But, uh, you know, that, those machine learning techniques allow us to do that. And I think that's only- Going to get stronger, that effect. And at a certain point, we will, we'll all know that we have mind-reading machines in some basic sense. There may be ways to foil them, but it's, it's just, it's, you know, if you're thinking about a, a blue house, you know, I say, "blue house," and you have to think about it. Uh, you kind of helplessly think about it on some level.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  You have, because just, just the mere understanding of the phrase, "blue house," uh, has gotten something into your head despite your best effort. You can't, you can't pretend you haven't understood these words. And that is reflected in areas of your brain that are going to be, uh, they're, they're reasonably easy to discriminate now, but at a certain point, it's, it's, I, I'm quite confident we'll have a machine which will, you know, you'll, you'll be able to say, "What, what, what phrase did he just hear?" And it's going to kick out "blue house," and it's going to kick out, kick it out for you, and it's going to kick it out for me. And, um, that's, that's mind-reading.

• 16:30Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing. That could have some incredible, just as a, as a, as a language-learning fanatic, that could have some incredible applications for communication, let alone, uh,

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:41Tim Ferriss?

  Thought detection. Let's, I, I want to take a step back. I, I, I love talking about this stuff, but there's so many subject areas that the neuroscience touches upon, that the science or the scientific method touches upon. But taking it down to even more sort of fundamental level, I, what I'd love, because you and I both have the experience of being misquoted rampantly in, in the media, and, or having the game of telephone where, where someone quotes you out of context and then something takes on a life of its own. What, what are the beliefs that you do hold that are the most controversial? And, and just, let's just say in the last several years. Uh, just, just so, just so people coming into this who may be familiar with reading

• 17:23Tim Ferriss?

  about you second-hand or third-hand can get a baseline on, on some of the things that you believe that, that are very hotly debated.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Right. It is, it is across the board in all my work. We're not talking about neuroscience per se, right?

• 17:36Tim Ferriss?

  No, this is, this is across the board.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, because I've, I've touched many different topics which, which, although there are connections, I, I see them more or less all of a piece, they, they can seem quite unrelated, so. That's totally fine. I've written about, I've written about gun control, I've written a whole lot about the problem of organized religion and the conflict between religion and science, and so I'll just, I'll just list the most controversial points. One, it keeps coming up, is my criticism of Islam, especially worried about Islam, more so than, than other religions, and I've given my reasons for this ad nauseam. The problem in, in the current environment is

• 18:20Speaker 03

  that any focus on Islam is easily, not easily, but it, but it seems to be everywhere attacked as synonymous with bigotry, and, and bizarrely synonymous with racism. So, as though being Muslim, we're, we're being a, a, a member of a race. So, the, the thing to tease out here is that, the reason why everyone's confused on this point is that, one, we, we have one word, religion, which covers this wide range of preoccupations, and it's not a very useful word, it's a word like sports, you know, and, and so sports covers Thai boxing, and it covers shuffleboard, or, or curling, or what, you know, so something that, that has basically

• 19:00Speaker 03

  no implication of violence, or even physical fitness, and, not to disparage curlers everywhere, but it's, what, what, what do Thai boxers and curlers have in common, apart from breathing, not a whole hell of a lot, and yet they're both sports. And so, if you want to get at what people are actually doing, and the kinds of risks they're running, and, and why they're running these risks, and when, what sort of attributes you need to succeed at these various athletic tasks, you, you don't get very far just talking about sports, and... Same is true with religion, and so we have the religion of Islam, and we have a religion like Jainism, which is an Indian religion that doesn't have that many subscribers, but

• 19:44Speaker 03

  it's, there's almost nothing in common between these religions, except the fact that they both rely on faith in a way that I would argue is totally unjustified to make claims about the nature of reality, but the claims they make are quite different, and the, the moral attitudes they form on the basis of these, these claims are completely different. So Jain, the Jains, for instance, are truly nonviolent, this is, this is the, the prototypical religion of peace, where the, the more extreme you get as a Jain, the less violent you become. So you can't even kill insects, you can't, you worry about killing bacteria, you know, the, the, the, the super extreme Jains wear, wear some, wear cheesecloth over their mouths

• 20:26Speaker 03

  so they don't inhale a bug, they, they look at the ground continuously when they walk so they don't step on ants, I mean, they're, they're, they're obviously vegetarian, and they're, they're just deranged by their commitment not to harm anything, no matter what. Now, those people are not going to become suicide bombers, no matter how we mistreat the Jains, they're not going to start flying planes into our buildings, and they're not going to form a death cult that worships martyrs, it's just not going to happen, it's just, you can't make sense of it in light of their core beliefs.

• 20:56Tim Ferriss?

  It's antithetical to the core doctrine.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and, and with Islam, by comparison, you have a doctrine of jihad, which really is a doctrine of holy war, you have a doctrine of martyrdom, which, which says that the, the only certain and swift way to get directly into paradise and be with Allah is to be martyred, and it's, it's incumbent upon every Muslim to, to defend the faith with violence when the faith is attacked, and it's, it's not an accident that people think that cartoonists and novelists should be murdered for, for blaspheming, and, and, and that apostates should be killed, because the, the, the penalty for apostasy under Islam really is death. So, you know, if I, if I convert to Islam today, and tomorrow I say, you know, I, I

• 21:41Speaker 03

  just took another look at the Quran, and it's just, it's just total bullshit, I'm, I'm de-converting right now. The penalty for that is death, and there's no one who can tell you that it isn't except those who are ignorant or lying about the faith. So, so it's totally rational to be concerned about Islam at this moment in a way that one isn't concerned about Jainism or Buddhism or Mormonism or any, any other religion. And given the level of white guilt in this world and our, and our understandable commitment to pluralism and multiculturalism and, and our guilt over the crimes of, or the errors we have made in our own foreign policy and the, and the previous crimes of colonialism,

• 22:23Speaker 03

  it's just, it's so easy for people to claim that a criticism of Islam is a criticism, is a, is tantamount to bigotry or racism. And they get away with it in every liberal newspaper on earth at the moment. It's just, it's, it's, they've almost successfully made it impossible to, to parse this issue. And it's, it's a huge problem. So that, that's the most, that's the, the first thing that's hugely controversial in, in my bio. And then wrapped up in that are lies about positions I've taken. Uh, so for instance, in, in my first book, The End of Faith, I talk about the, essentially

• 23:03Speaker 03

  the game theoretic problem of, of, uh, nuclear proliferation and the possibility of nuclear war. And this is very brief, it's like two paragraphs. I talk about how, you know, we, we had this, this doctrine of mutually assured destruction with the Soviet Union, and that worked because no one, no significant number of people on either side were eager to die and get to paradise. And, and, and I, I said that we're not going to be able to have a doctrine of mutually assured destruction with a regime that has long-range nuclear weapons that can reach the major cities of the United States and Europe that is peopled by essentially the Taliban or Al Qaeda or, or the, the psychological equivalent of the 19 hijackers.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  If, if we are in the presence of people who we are sure are really ready to be martyred and they, and they love death as much as we love life. Uh, and we believe that that's who we're in the presence of and they have now have this technology. Then the first use of nuclear weapons becomes a matter of life and death and it would it's it's just an obscene situation for us to wander into and we have to anticipate it. Now that all got summarized by some very unscrupulous people as I call for an immediate first strike on the entire Muslim world and I'm eager to kill, you know, 500 million people. And there there's some people like, you know, real journalists like Chris Hedges or people who used to be real journalists who have gone around telling people that I have called for a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world, which is which is absolutely untrue.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  But it I don't think there's a comment thread on me anywhere that doesn't have somebody in it saying this guy wants to to to drop nuclear bombs on on a hundred countries. So in any case, it

• 24:44Tim Ferriss?

  No, it's it's it's frustrating in cases as someone who feels that they know you and at least has spent time with you. I feel like one of your gifts is being able to, in in many cases, dispassionately and rationally judge the facts or the circumstances and then come to conclusions that you might describe whether or not they are popular. And this makes you a target. And obviously, you know,

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:12Tim Ferriss?

  If it bleeds, it leads type of journalism will lead to mischaracterization, which is really unfortunate. Uh, and I and there there are many things that are sort of artfully omitted, like your in this was this was something I heard in the Joe Rogan podcast, uh, episode that, uh, I guess maybe one of several you've done, but your thoughts on Malala. So, I mean, I I'd be curious to hear you just elaborate on that because it's so often sort of omitted, uh, that, I mean, it correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean, you she was your pick for the Nobel Peace Prize. Am I am I right in saying that? Or would

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. She she deserved it, uh, more than almost anyone I could think of, but I think it's also a very good thing she didn't get it because her security concerns would be even worse as a result. It's just it's amazing and these are things that people don't want to really reflect on, but when she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, her popularity in Pakistan went way down and the Taliban has kept asserting that they were they're going to kill her and she would be even more of a target had she won it, but Yeah, no, I said she was the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in a thousand years. I think she is just an absolute hero and someone who deserves all of the celebration

• 26:32Speaker 03

  she's received. It's just, this is the thing that reveals what's so crazy about this whole Islamophobia meme, this idea that criticism of Islam is tantamount to some kind of bigotry or an animus against Muslims as people. Everything I say about Islam is, I'm saying about the doctrine of Islam and its consequences on the behavior of people and their thinking. But this has nothing to do with being bigoted against Muslims as people and certainly not bigoted against dark-skinned people or Arab people. And one of my main concerns about Islam is the amount of suffering visited upon Muslim women throughout the developing

• 27:16Speaker 03

  world. So people like Malala, she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for the crime of going to school. And what scares me about that situation so much is that in most circumstances you think, well, any guy who could do that must be a psychopath. He must be a, you know, some guy like James Holmes or Adam Lanza or one of these spree killers we have here who represents nothing other than his own psychopathology. But that's not true. You know, I don't know anything specific about this Taliban gunman, but what I know is that it's statistically impossible that all jihadists are psychopaths. And we know enough

• 27:55Speaker 03

  about the biographies of many of these men to know that these are not low-functioning, depressed, suicidal people who have nothing to live for. These are, functionally, the quarterback of the football team decides to, he's got lots of opportunity in life and he may have a degree as an engineer, but then he also decides that dying in defense of the faith and getting to paradise is the best use of his life. And oppressing women who should be, who essentially have no other purpose in life but to reflect well on the

• 28:34Speaker 03

  honor of their men, oppressing them is a totally rational thing to do and a necessary thing to do. And so, yeah, I think Malala... Is a great symbol and deserves all the praise she's gotten. The reason why she is celebrated to this degree she is, however, apart from her obvious virtues as a speaker and a person, is that she has not repudiated Islam. She is Muslim and a believer and still just a kid in many respects. But someone who's very much like her, who is often vilified on the political left, is

• 29:17Speaker 03

  my friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who's a Somali woman who emigrated to Holland fleeing a forced marriage when she was 20 and very quickly learned Dutch and got a degree in political science and became a member of the Dutch parliament. And there in parliament fought for the rights of Muslim women living in Holland who were living with men who had imported all of these same practices of female genital mutilation and other forms of coercion. And her collaborator on a film, Theo van Gogh, was killed and a note suborning Ayaan's murder

• 30:00Speaker 03

  was pinned to his chest with a knife. And she has ever since lived in essentially perpetual flight from theocrats who want to kill her and also under the perpetual shadow of criticism from liberals who attack her as a bigot because she says, in very much the same terms I'm expressing here, that there's a unique problem with Islam at this moment in history, that Islam is not just like every other religion. It is certainly not a religion of peace and all of the oppression we see of women in the Muslim world is not an accident. It actually has a very strong scriptural foundation.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  For the crime of saying those things, as a woman who came from Somalia, who suffered herself female genital mutilation and has been running from bearded men who want to kill her, she still doesn't have the right to say that. You might have noticed that she was just invited and then disinvited by Brandeis University. She was given, offered an honorary degree and then there was protest by a handful of Muslim organizations and they disinvited her and removed the honorary degree. Our liberal institutions are getting bullied by theocrats under the guise of political correctness and multiculturalism and it's really, it's depressing.

• 31:25Tim Ferriss?

  So if you take this, I mean, I've observed this particularly, for lack of a better description, I mean, sort of, the people who are most worried of being labeled racist themselves, sort of liberal white males, are the first to dogpile on people, almost in a new form of like McCarthyism, to label others racist, which is sort of the ultimate cop-out in terms of character assassination in a lot of ways. And what is the, if we take that behavior, which is becoming very, very common, and then it becomes this horrible sort of self-perpetuating phenomenon where people are more and more

• 32:09Tim Ferriss?

  disinclined to speak out against things they think to be wrong for fear of being labeled a racist or whatnot. If this sort of trend continues unabated, like where does that take us? I mean, where do you think that's going to end up? Where it's like, all right, you can't, no cartoons, no this, no teddy bears, no, like, when you sort of extrapolate this out, if there are people who intervene to try to correct this, this sort of madness on some level, what happens? I mean, where do we end up?

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Well, to some degree, we've slid halfway there, I think. I think we have, I argued this at one point on my blog in a piece, I think the title was "The Freedom to Offend an Imaginary God," which got a fair amount of play at some point when it came out, something that happened in the news, I now forget what, and I wrote about it there. And the point I made is that we actually have already forfeited our free speech on this topic. Voluntarily, I mean, we've just given it away with both hands. Uh, we technically still have free speech, uh, but just think about, an example I gave in this, this piece is, just think about the, the, the play, The Book of Mormon, and

• 33:23Speaker 03

  imagine trying to stage a play, a similar play about Islam. I mean, what would have happened? So what happened with The Book of Mormon is the Mormon church wasn't happy with it. And the way they protested is they took out ads in playbill for the Mormon faith, right? Which is a, this totally cute, good natured maneuver to, to try to trumpet the virtues of their, their religious bamboozlement in the context of its criticism in this, in this play. But no one can seriously argue that we could stage, that, you know, that Trey Parker and Matt Stone could have staged a play about Islam and when they, when they, when they

• 34:04Speaker 03

  put Muhammad on, um, their cartoon, South Park, they put him in a hidden, in a bear suit. There was a bear, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a bear who was supposed to be Muhammad in a bear suit. Uh, and even that guy had to get taken off the air because of the, the security concerns raised at, at Comedy Central. So we have been successfully bullied into self censorship on this topic. Uh, and, uh, it has, it has a huge cost. I mean, when those, the Danish cartoons were published, there was not a magazine in the United States who would publish them, except for one, that Free Inquiry, which is this, this tiny atheist magazine.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Uh, and that, even that was removed from the stands at every, uh, border, I think it was borders at the time, uh, in, in the country. So, and, and television stations wouldn't show these cartoons. No one could see how benign these cartoons were, because in all the controversy about them, we wouldn't show the cartoons to ourselves because, uh, because we were so afraid of the consequences. And yet, they were genuinely newsworthy because the thing to have recognized about those cartoons is they were totally benign. I mean, these were the most boring cartoons anyone's ever seen, and yet people were being killed in dozens of countries over them. There were literally riots and embassy burnings and... Um, and this, and this, we have this crazy double standard where we have politicians

• 35:29Speaker 03

  saying that, no, no, this has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is really a religion of peace. And yet, at the same politicians, at the same moment, are beefing up security on their embassies and closing embassies and taking heroic measures not to be the object of violence that they know is coming because of how fanatical millions upon millions of, of Muslims are in dozens, scores really, of countries. And this self censorship is not just happening in, uh, the developing world or in Europe where that arguably has a more radicalized Muslim population. It's happening in the States and it's, it's just a huge, I mean, so I, you know, I have security concerns.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't, they're nothing like, uh, someone like my, my friend Ayans or, or, uh, Malalas. Uh, but it, it's just people see what a hassle it is to deal with the consequences of, of making sense on this issue. And the hassle ranges from the real security concerns where you, you have to take steps, you know, not to get injured or killed, to just the hassle of, of, of being criticized as a racist by, uh, people haven't, just haven't thought this, thought this through or people who are just cynically using, uh, that angle to, to, to fame you.

• 36:52Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. No, that makes sense. I, um, I want to, I want to shift gears just a little bit, uh, because they're all, a lot of these are very interrelated. There's the sort of anti-religion, it's a canon of work that you have, which you're well, very well known for, but, um, and correct me if this quote is incorrect, but there, there's a quote here that is, quote, "There's nothing irrational about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many religions. Compassion, awe, devotion, feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have," end quote. Assuming that's true, and you and I have, of course, talked about altered states and you've written about altered states, I'd love to just dig into that expression, or

• 37:32Tim Ferriss?

  that quote, rather, and look at the alternate approaches, uh, that you've perhaps explored or researched related to achieving some of these valuable states.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so in the beginning of my career, as you point out, I spent a lot of time criticizing religion and criticizing it for its obvious harms and, but one of its harms that's not so obvious is that it keeps us talking about this positive end of human experience, the self-transcendence and highly normative states of consciousness in first century or seventh century terms. And most people, most of the time, think that you have, the only way to capture, quote, "spiritual experience" and one's interest in it and

• 38:27Speaker 03

  the ways in which one would explore it is to, to some degree, indulge the myth, the myth-intoxicated language of the Iron Age. There's just no way to talk about it otherwise. Science hasn't given us the tools to talk about it. Secular culture doesn't give us the tools to talk about it. And so, we're left talking about being Christians and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and organize our lives around those really incompatible, the incompatible truth claims and doctrines that you find in those religions. And people, very smart people who are secular and every other way, think there's just no, there's no alternative to that. And so, one of my main interests now is in articulating an alternative because

• 39:12Speaker 03

  clearly there are extraordinary experiences that people have, and many of these experiences do lie at the core of many of our religions. And so, you know, to take Jesus as an obvious example, who knows who Jesus actually was and, you know, what is historically true in the, in the New Testament. But, let's just say, for argument's sake, that, that there really was a guy who loved his neighbor as himself and had this extraordinarily charismatic effect on the people around him and bore witness to this possibility of, of a kind of radical self-transcendence. Well, That, clearly, that whatever's true there is deeper than Christianity and it's not,

• 39:54Speaker 03

  it's not reducible to Christianity. In fact, Christianity has to be a distortion of that truth because, and we know this because Jesus isn't the only person who's had that experience. There's the Buddha and the countless contemplatives through the ages have had, can attest to this experience of, for lack of a better phrase, unconditional love. And that has some relationship to what I would call self-transcendence, which I think is even more important. And so there's this phenomenon that's clearly deeper than any of our provincial ways of talking about it in the context of religion. And so it's the deeper truth of human psychology

• 40:32Speaker 03

  and the nature of consciousness. And I think we need to explore it in terms that don't require that we lie to ourselves or to our children about the nature of reality and that we don't indulge this divisive language of picking teams in the religious, in the contest among religions. So, yeah, my next book that's coming out in the fall is called Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. And it's about the phenomenon of self-transcendence and the ways in which people can explore it without believing anything on insufficient evidence. And one of the principal ways is through various techniques

• 41:17Speaker 03

  of meditation, mindfulness being the, I think, the most useful one to adopt first. There's also the use of psychedelic drugs, which is not quite the same as meditation, but it does, if nothing else, reveals that the human nervous system is plastic in a very important way, which means you can, your experience of the world can be radically transformed. You are tending to be who you were yesterday by virtue of... Various habit patterns and physiological homeostasis and other things that are keeping

• 42:01Speaker 03

  you very recognizable to yourself, but it's possible to have a very different experience. And it's possible to do that through pharmacology, it's possible to do that through some kind of crisis, or it's possible to do it through a deliberate form of training like meditation. And it's, I think it's crucial to do because we all want to be as happy and as fulfilled and as free of pointless suffering as we can possibly be. And there's a, all of our suffering and all of our unhappiness is a product of how our minds are in every moment.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  And so if there's a way to use the mind itself to improve one's capacity for moment-to-moment well-being, which I'm convinced there is, then this should be potentially of interest to everybody.

• 42:55Tim Ferriss?

  So, a couple of quick questions on all of those subjects. So the first, the first I'd like to touch on, meditation, I think we can probably touch on this briefly, is something we've discussed before, you along with many other people who are high performers in their respective fields have recommended meditation. So I have been meditating, partially in thanks to your influence for some time now. Is it, is it safe to say that the meditation that you most frequently recommend to novices is Vipassana meditation, or is that...

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:31Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it. Why is that? I mean, I've, I've experimented with a number of different types of transcendental meditation, Vipassana of course, and have taken a number of courses. Why that selection? Why that choice?

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, it has a few obvious strengths that are actually not shared by, by any other technique I, I know of. The first is that it's, it doesn't...

• 43:59Speaker 03

  It needn't presuppose any belief about anything. I mean, you don't have to develop a fondness for the iconography of Buddhism. You don't have to care about the Buddha. You don't have to believe in rebirth or karma, or I mean, none of the doctrine of Buddhism need be adopted in order to get the practice off the ground and never need be adopted if it never makes any sense, which much of it doesn't. You don't have to become a Buddhist to do this, and you don't have to add anything strategically to your experience as a mechanism by which to meditate. So you're not adding a mantra. You're not visualizing something that isn't there. You don't have to look at a candle flame, or do anything to your environment

• 44:43Speaker 03

  to, by way of artifice, to create the circumstance of meditation. All you're doing is paying exquisitely close and nonjudgmental attention to whatever you're experiencing anyway. So, and the first technique you use to be able to train that capacity is to focus on your breath, which you always have with you, and is just an easy object to focus on. But you don't, it doesn't even have to be the breath. I mean, mindfulness is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations and even thoughts themselves, without being lost in thought and without grasping at what is pleasant

• 45:27Speaker 03

  and pushing what is unpleasant away. So just being wide open to the next sensory or emotional experience that comes careening into consciousness. That is mindfulness. And so, in some sense, it's not even a practice. It's just, it is just the state of not being distracted and being aware. And you have to, it feels like a practice in the beginning because... It's hard to do. We're so deeply conditioned to be lost in thought and to be having this conversation with ourselves. From the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep, we're just, there's just chatter in the mind and it's so captivating that we're not even aware

• 46:06Speaker 03

  of it. I mean, we are essentially in a dream state and it's through, it's through this veil of thought that we go about our day and perceive our environments, but we're just, we're just talking to ourselves non-stop. And until you can break that spell and begin to notice thoughts themselves as objects of consciousness just arising and passing away, you can't even pay attention to your breath or to anything else with any kind of clarity. And so initially you have to develop some concentration and get mindfulness tuned up to, so that you can, you can pay attention. But once you can pay attention, it doesn't matter what you pay attention to. There's nothing in principle that is outside the

• 46:50Speaker 03

  meditation practice. There's nothing that's in principle a distraction. You don't, you don't need a quiet environment. You can have loud construction noises going across the street and that's just as good a circumstance for meditation as, as anything else. And so that's, that's the, those are the main reasons why I think it's, it's the, in terms of being designed for export outside of Buddhist culture or religious culture generally and, and becoming a tool for our intellectual lives in a secular scientific context, I think there's nothing, nothing like it.

• 47:24Tim Ferriss?

  What, what resources would you suggest for someone who wants to try to educate themselves or dive in as a novice in terms of books, resources, websites, uh, for, for mindfulness and meditation?

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I give a few on my blog. I wrote an article a couple of years ago entitled How to Meditate. And if people Google that, they'll, they'll see I, I link to a few books and I tell people where they can go on retreats and, and so I, and I briefly described the practice. I also have given, there's a couple of guided mindfulness meditations I've, I've put on SoundCloud, which are on my website as well.

• 47:59Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  So people can, and, and there are other guided meditations out there that people can, can use. And, and in the beginning, people find that very helpful to be, to have somebody's voice. Essentially reminding them to not be lost in thought every few seconds. It's because what happens in the beginning for people, and this happened to me in my practice for at least a year, I think it was a year before I went on intensive silent retreat. I was just sitting for an hour a day or so, just on my own, I was twenty or so. And essentially, I was just sitting cross-legged and thinking. You know, it's so hard to notice that you're lost in thought, but by tendency, you're

• 48:45Speaker 03

  just not going to notice it. And in the beginning, people think they're meditating and they're really just lost in thought. And it wasn't until I did my first ten-day Vipassana retreat where I broke through and connected with the practice in a way that I realized, wow, all of that that has preceded this was really my thinking I was meditating and not meditating. And there are other landmarks along my journey that are like that, where there was a shift where I realized, wow, what I thought was happening really was not happening as I thought it was. And that's a very common experience. And so in the beginning, using a guided meditation can help cut through the chatter

• 49:30Speaker 03

  in a way that many people can't summon on their own.

• 49:34Tim Ferriss?

  Related to cutting through the chatter, people ask me, well, let me take a sidestep, which is people ask me, what blogs do you read? And there really aren't many blogs that I read consistently, aside from a handful. And partially, I read your blog and the posts you put up because they're like feature magazine articles in many cases. And there's one you wrote in 2011 called Drugs in the Meaning of Life, and you've written about this subject before. I have found certain hallucinogens in particular to be very therapeutically valuable for cutting through the chatter and sort of turning that off and bringing present state awareness to you in a very high-definition way when used responsibly.

• 50:16Tim Ferriss?

  And of course, as you point out in this piece, it's not to say that everyone should take psychedelics, but... I'd be curious to know, you know, one of the lines here, it needs to be read in context, of course, but, you know, I have a daughter who will one day take drugs, of course, I'll do everything in my power to see that she chooses her drugs wisely, but a life without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable. And then you, then you obviously go through sort of the, how you might guide her to view these different subjects. And one of, one of the closing lines in this paragraph is, but if she does not try psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience. And

• 50:57Tim Ferriss?

  I, I agree with this. I'd be curious to hear sort of what particular drugs or psychedelic substances you've found most therapeutically valuable in your own life, and how you suggest people think about this. Obviously, there are, I mean, putting, you have to put the legal, potential legal ramifications in perspective also, but what have you personally found most valuable and how so?

• 51:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, again, you found another paragraph where I was happy to court controversy, saying that I'll be disappointed if my daughter doesn't drop acid. But the, so the caveat here, and it's, the caveat comes out several times in that piece is that-

• 51:41Tim Ferriss?

  Which everybody should read in full. I'm not trying to pull anything out of context. I just don't want to read the whole thing to them now.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  I, I, I stand by every word, but there, there are a lot of words in there. And, and the, the caveat really is that, you know, I have, I have an increasingly healthy respect for what can go wrong on psychedelics, and wrong in a way that I think has lasting consequences for people. And so, I mean, there's a lot that can go right with psychedelics. And, and to some degree, I think they- They're still indispensable for a lot of people. They certainly seem to be indispensable for me. I don't think I ever would have discovered meditation without having taken, in particular MDMA,

• 52:27Speaker 03

  but MDMA and mushrooms and LSD all played a role for me in unveiling an inner landscape that was worth exploring. But for that pharmacological advantage, I think I was just, my consciousness was such that, you know, I looked inside, I saw nothing of interest, and that's sort of the end of the conversation. You tell me that there's something profound to witness about the nature of my own mind, I don't see it, you know? I just wanna, you know, get on with the next thing in the world that seems fun to do or seems likely to lead to my success. Or I just was, you know, a skin-encapsulated ego who was just trying to get on with life

• 53:11Speaker 03

  and succeed and thought he was very clever and didn't have the contemplative tools to see much of anything when, you know, he paid attention. And so that's the situation that many people are in and many smart people are in that position. So I'm constantly meeting scientists and philosophers and highly articulate people who spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of the human mind. And when I talk to them about meditation or really any of these philosophical issues that for which an ability to pay attention to the nature of your own consciousness is an advantage, so something like free will or the nature of the self or the possibility

• 53:55Speaker 03

  of self-transcendence, I'm meeting people who have, as far as I can tell, no ability to notice their inner lives. These people who, some of them seem simply not to have inner lives, but these are people who are very much the way I was when I was, you know, eighteen and before I had had any experience with any of this. There's just, you're, you're lost in thought and you don't know it. And that phrase, "lost in thought," means nothing to you. And you don't have the tools by which to do anything with it, even if it had, if it meant something to you. And there's just nothing, you're, you're, you're cognitively closed to the data.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Uh, and the data are, uh, are, are there to be found, the, the most important point of which is the self you think you are is an illusion. This, this sense of being a self riding around in your head, uh, this feeling of "I," this feeling that we, everyone calls "I," uh, is an illusion that can, that can be disconfirmed in a variety of ways. It can be, uh, its boundaries can, can be transformed in ways, or it can be completely cut through and vanish for, for a moment, or a minute, or potentially for the rest of one's life. And so, so it is, it's vulnerable to inquiry, and that inquiry can take many forms, but,

• 55:18Speaker 03

  but the, the unique power of psychedelics is that, wh- whether or not they, I mean, this is, there's a, there's a unique power, there's a uni- unique liability. The, the, the unique power and liability is that they are guaranteed to work in some way. And this is a point that Terrence McKenna always made. Right. Uh, you know, Terrence McKenna was a huge booster of psychedelics and a, you know, very articulate one, and he, he poo-pooed any other spiritual methodology, meditation and, um, you know, chanting and, you know, yoga, anything else that, that people brought to him, saying, "Well, can't you, you kind of get the same benefit without drugs?" And his point was, "Well, you, you, you teach someone to meditate, you teach them yoga,

• 56:01Speaker 03

  they, there's no guarantee whatsoever that something's gonna happen. You know, they could, they could spend a week doing it, they could spend a year doing it, who knows what's gonna happen? They may just get bored, uh, and they're gonna wander away from this thing, not knowing that there was a there there. If I give you, you know, five grams of mushrooms, or three hundred micrograms of LSD, and tell you to sit on that couch for an hour, you are guaranteed to have a radical transformation in your experience. It's just, it doesn't matter who you are, this thing, this freight train of, of significance is gonna come bearing down on you, uh, and we just have to watch the clock and know it's gonna happen. And that's a, that's a fact, but the, the, uh, so that's, that's the, the advantage, because...

• 56:43Speaker 03

  You're guaranteed to realize at the end of that episode that it is possible to have a radically different experience than you tend to have. And if you have a good experience, you're gonna, you're gonna realize that, that, that human life can be just unutterably sublime, that it's possible to, to feel at home in the universe in a way that you, you couldn't have previously imagined. But if you have a bad experience, uh, and the bad experiences are every bit as bad as the good experiences are good, you, you will have just this, this how, this, this harrowing encounter with madness. And it's, it's, it's, you know, it's as pathological as any, you know, lunatic who's, who's wandering

• 57:26Speaker 03

  the streets, uh, you know, raving to himself and completely cut off from others. You can have that experience and, and hopefully it goes away and in, you know, virtually every case it does go away, but it's, it's still, um, it's still rough and it still has, has consequences for people. Um, some of the consequences are good. I happen to think that, that, that it, it gives you a basis for compassion, uh, in particular for, for, you know, people who are suffering mental illness that you couldn't otherwise have. But, you know, it's not an experience that I'm eager to have again. And so, I, I, so I haven't, you know, my healthy respect for the power of psychedelics has led me to not take many for many years.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  And it's been, it's been years since I've taken anything and my, my youth tapered off in my twenties when I, when I got into meditation and was spending more time on retreat and feel, beginning to feel that I was getting, kinda hitting the center of the bullseye with meditation in a way that I was certainly not guaranteed to with psychedelics, that I, I basically stopped using everything and, and just practice meditation. But there, there's no question that I, I wouldn't have become sufficiently interested in meditation but for the experiences I had on LSD and, and MDMA in particular.

• 58:42Tim Ferriss?

  Have you had any experience with DMT or ayahuasca?

• 58:47Speaker 03

  I haven't, I haven't. I've always, uh, DMT is, is the one thing now that would be tempting because I, I haven't done it and it has such a, a short half-life. Uh, even the whole trip is, is, you know, it's something like 10 minutes long.

• 59:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if not shorter, yeah, five to 10 minutes.

• 59:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it would be tempting, but I have, I haven't done it and, um, what about you? Is that, have you done either?

• 59:09Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, I have, uh, I have tried DMT, which I believe is dimethyltryptamine, which is sometimes, if I'm not mistaken, referred to as the spirit molecule. Uh, it's, it's become, uh, an, an area of research, uh, although the, some of it might not qualify as, as what you would consider research. Uh, I'm very fascinated by DMT. I, my experience with it was, uh, unique and not terrifying. And I'd like to actually come back to the fear component. It was, it was a very manageable experience, complete physical and psychological disassociation, uh, where there was just, for me at least, pure whiteness. It was just pure white and extremely acute hearing.

• 59:52Tim Ferriss?

  Now, what, what element of that hearing was actually external stimuli? And what component of that was hallucin, uh, hallucination, I can't say. Uh, it was a good experience. I don't feel compelled to repeat it. And I'm sure you've had those experiences. Ayahuasca in the more extended sort of ceremonial context, uh, is something that I, I do have plans to experience and I'll report back when I have more to report. But I, I found that, at least for me, the form factor of the substance, of course, has an impact on your experience and that can be related to the, the ritual or the, the, the process of consuming it.

• 1:00:34Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, but it can also be pharmacological in so much as I drink yerba mate tea very often, uh, and became a huge fan while I lived in Argentina. But I don't typically consume, say, the cold, ready to drink yerba mates or the, uh, pre-bagged yerba mate that you steep as you would a normal cup of, of tea. I, I really, I go through the process of putting the... The chippings, if you want to call them that, into the gourd with the sticks and everything. And I sip it over a period of hours. And I feel like the biochemical effect is very different from, say, mainlining it by chugging 16 ounces.

• 1:01:14Tim Ferriss?

  And I felt like the DMT was the kind of crack cocaine version of the ayahuasca experience. And so I've noticed for myself at least that a slightly longer period of time using, say, a higher dose, you know, five to nine grams, and that's a very personal thing, obviously. I'm not a doctor, don't play one on the internet. But as a reset with psilocybin has a huge persistent therapeutic effect for a period of months in some cases. And I'm hoping to get that from ayahuasca in a way that I did not with the five to 10 minute DMT experience. Right. So that's where I currently stand.

• 1:01:58Tim Ferriss?

  But I'd be curious to know if you have any opinions on how someone can decrease the likelihood of having a horrifying negatively life impacting experience with hallucinogens. And I mean, I've been of the thought for a while now that lucid dreaming could provide some degree of rehearsal and practice with separating reality from irreality, or sort of objective truth from that which you're creating in your own mind, to give you a slightly greater degree of comfort when you go into a psychedelic state. Whether or not that's true is of course up to debate. But do you have any thoughts on what characterizes the people, aside from some type of latent psychosis or, you know, split personality disorder?

• 1:02:43Tim Ferriss?

  What can someone do or what should they do prior to a psychedelic experience to minimize the likelihood of having a hugely negative experience?

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  It's something I really don't have a, an a- answer for that I'm confident in. I would, I would just be parroting the, the standard advice about set and setting and, you know, your, your mental set going in and, and your physical setting and your, your, your social setting are, are, obviously do a lot to set the trajectory of any experience. But it's, it, there's a lot of, of uncertainty in there. And I, you know, I've, I've had experiences where my set and setting seemed perfect and I just got catapulted into hell for reasons that, that I, I never understood. Right. And there's, there's no way to go back and understand them. So it's, and I've had,

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  yeah, I've had absolutely blissful experiences, uh, we, under, uh, conditions that were more or less identical. Uh, what, what I did find though is that, once I started having negative experiences, I continued to, to have them. Right. It's like the, the door to hell had been left ajar. Uh, whereas previously it just hadn't existed. I mean, I, I distinctly recall what it was like to hear about bad trips on LSD and to have no idea what that could possibly mean. I had, I had done LSD maybe seven or 10 times at that point. And, um, this is again in my, my early twenties. I, I, I, I approached this, you know, very, I was a very committed, you know, serious,

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  uh, you know, psycho not in, in, you know, someone who's, who's really like doing this not, not recreationally, but really doing it to, to discover something about the nature of my own mind and to, and to, uh, get free of, of, uh, suffering that, that, uh, I couldn't really see otherwise getting free of. And, and, and so I, you know, at one point I was taking acid, I think, once a month. I was at an undergraduate at Stanford and was, you know, on the side, basically reinventing the sixties for myself. (laughing) Uh, and, you know, reading, reading about eastern philosophy and, and I had just started learning to meditate. I hadn't yet gone on my first, my first extended retreat.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  And I was taking, you know, I used an isolation tank once and I, you know, I was, I was really trying to, and I had virtually no guidance apart from books. And I was just trying to, to explore all of this. And I would say for my first 10 trips on LSD, There was not even the subtlest intimation of the possibility of feeling bad on this drug. I mean, it was just, I just got launched into an experience of just the most diaphanous and gorgeous profundity where you just, you know, the world was, it was just this shimmering

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  reality bathed in energy and I was a part of that energy and, and, you know, all of the, the language of, of traditional mysticism made sense, uh, in a good way, uh, without any of the, the dark night of the soul, uh, stuff coming in and, but then, you know, the first time, so, so, so that, so, so just you picture it going into each subsequent trip, you would think, well, now, now my set and setting have to be perfect because my, my expectation is that I'm gonna just recapitulate this, this perfectly sublime and happy experience. I'm taking the same batch of LSD. I'm, I've, I've now got this down to a science in terms of where I wanna be and who I wanna be with while I do this.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  And, you know, so I'm in, I'm in, you know, beautiful nature, you know, I'm in mere woods or I'm, I'm, I'm just alone in my apartment, uh, you know, listening to good music or, or whatever it is, but I'm safe and there's nothing sketchy that's gonna, gonna set me off. Uh, and I've never had a bad trip, but, you know, there was, there was some first trip that went, uh, haywire and then subsequently, no matter how good the highs were in, in my, my subsequent trips, that there was always something where I saw, wow, that was, it could've just gone sideways there, uh, or did go sideways for some period of time. And then, then it just, the, the costs began, began to seem, uh, potentially too high for

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  me and the upside, I, I felt like I'd already gotten the benefit of, of essentially having... Advertise to this possibility of being much wiser and happier than I tend to be. And so then I just decided I would go at it through another door of meditation. But like you, I felt that the half-life of the positive effect of these good experiences was on the order of weeks and months. But I also felt that the half-life of the negative effects was just as long. So I had a bad trip, you know, one bad trip, and I felt, you know, three months later, I was still dealing with the neurophysiological consequences of that and the interpersonal consequences.

• 1:07:49Tim Ferriss?

  Was that LSD or what was the substance?

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, that was LSD. Yeah, it just, it seemed like, it really seemed like a crapshoot. It just seemed like you're gonna spin the wheel and see whether you're gonna be a saint or a madman for the next ten hours. And, you know, obviously you had a preference for which it would be, but not much control over which it would be. And the other issue for me with psychedelics is that what now I consider to be the crucial insight, that is the center of the bullseye for what I would call a spirituality that is coincident with a 21st century psychology and secular science.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  The center of the bullseye insight is, comes to this point of the nature of the self and whether or not it's an illusion and whether one can cut through that illusion at will. You know, if when you look for yourself, you fail to find it in a way that is clear and compelling and frees you from the tyranny of your own thoughts and the suffering you were experiencing a moment ago, that's the center of the bullseye for me. And the ability to do that is available through the practice of meditation. And psychedelics...

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  Don't address that issue in a precise way. I mean, you can be hurled past any self-problem on the right drug and experience this glorious freedom from self. But one thing that you get with that is that you get this understanding, which I think is a fallacious understanding, that somehow freedom is dependent upon altered states of consciousness. Unless you're seeing everything in technical color, or it's the peak of the fireworks show, you're not going to be experiencing the most profound spiritual experience you can have.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  And certainly, you're not going to experience it once you come back down and everything is normal again. But the insight into selflessness that you get through meditation is that ordinary waking consciousness, precisely the consciousness in which we're having this conversation, and which I can see my phone, and if you tell me to turn up the volume, I can do that. And then I can get my keys, and I can get in the car, and I can drive safely. Ordinary consciousness is already completely free of self, and that can be recognized. The place you want to be able to run that experiment is in ordinary waking consciousness.

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  You don't need to be experiencing synesthesia for the first time on ayahuasca, and seeing, as Terrence McKenna often describes, seeing people's meaning visually beheld, and have a complete transformation of your sensory apparatus in order to experience the relevant loss of self. And so, that's the other reason why I'm more focused on meditation than psychedelics at the moment.

• 1:11:08Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that is a topic I would love to expand upon, maybe in a round two. I always enjoy our conversations. I want to let you get back to everything that you need to get back to. What I'd encourage everyone to do is read Sam's material directly. Listen to some of the debates, or watch some of the debates. Go to samharris.org. The post that I referenced earlier, Drugs and the Meaning of Life, is one of many different articles that I would suggest checking out. Another one is The Riddle of the Gun, which maybe we'll get into next time we chat. But this is always fun for me. Sam, we need to hang out more.

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, likewise.

• 1:11:53Tim Ferriss?

  And let's have a round two sometime. No huge rush. But it'd be fun to grab a glass of wine sometime in the near future as well.

• 1:12:01Speaker 03

  That'd be great. I look forward to it.

• 1:12:03Tim Ferriss?

  All right, Sam. Well, thank you very much, and I'll talk to you soon.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, take care, bro.

• 1:12:08Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, bye-bye.

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  If you want more of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to fourhourblog.com.

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  Where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter at twitter.com/TFerriss.

• 1:12:38Speaker 04

  Or on Facebook at facebook.com/TimFerriss. Until next time, thanks for listening.